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Thursday, June 23, 2016

Killing Floor 2, Tripwire Interactive's cooperative zombie-killing first-person horde-mode shooter, has been in Steam's Early Access for over a year. I've been playing it on and off over the span of the last 14 months, racking up 178 hours of gameplay during that time, usually coming back any time there's a new update, playing for a while, and then eventually losing interest. With the recent release of the "Bullseye Content Pack," which finally introduces the beloved Sharpshooter role from the original Killing Floor, I figured it was time to take another look at KF2 and update you all on where it stands after a year of development, and whether it's worth getting when it inevitably goes on sale this summer.

I wish I could sing praises about how far the game has come since it launched into Early Access, because KF2 is a game I really want to like. The original Killing Floor is the most-played game in my Steam library, and KF2 has a lot of great ideas that would seem to improve upon the successful formula of KF1. And yet, I find myself constantly annoyed by all the decisions Tripwire makes in regards to the game's development. It seems like every time they roll out a new update, it comes with some feature that completely breaks the game, or else makes it significantly less fun to play. With Tripwire's ridiculously slow development process, it then takes months before they get around to fixing things, if they ever address the issue at all. Meanwhile, they can't seem to make up their minds about what they actually want the game to be, which leaves the game feeling like a confused mess that often just isn't very fun to play.